1. Field
Apparatuses and methods consistent with exemplary embodiments of the inventive concept relate to transmitting and receiving date using broadcasting, more particularly, to the design of non-uniform constellations used in a Bit Interleaved Coded Modulation (BICM) mapping bits at an output of an encoder and interleaver to complex constellations.
2. Description of the Related Art
The current broadcasting systems consistent with the Digital Video Broadcasting Second Generation Terrestrial (DVB-T2) use a Bit Interleaved and Coded Modulation (BICM) chain in order to encode bits to be transmitted. The BICM chain includes a channel encoder like a Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) encoder followed by a Bit Interleaver and a Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) mapper. The role of the QAM mapper is to map different bits output from the channel encoder and interleaved using the Bit Interleaver to QAM cells. Each cell represents a complex number having real and imaginary part. The QAM mapper groups M bits into one cell. Each cell is translated into a complex number. M, which is the number of bits per cell, is equal to 2 for QPSK, 4 for 16 QAM, 6 for 64 QAM, and 8 for 256. It is possible to use a higher QAM size in order to increase a throughput. For example: 1K QAM is a constellation containing 1024 possible points and used to map M=10 bits. The DVB-T2 and previous standards use a uniform QAM. The uniform QAM has two important properties: possible points of constellation are rectangular, and spacing between each two successive points is uniform. The uniform QAM is very easy to map and demap.
The QAM is also easy to use since it does not need to be optimised as a function of the signal to noise ratio (SNR) or the coding rate of the channel code like the LDPC code. However, the capacity of the uniform QAM leaves a big gap from the theoretical limit, known as the Shannon limit. The performance in terms of bit error rate (BER) or frame error rate (FER) may be far from optimal.